Very heavy or extended precipitation can lead to flooding. Similarly, heavy tropical storms can cause flooding of low lying coastal areas. The damage caused by these floods is greatly reduced if residents are able to create sandbag dikes to confine the water to non-residential areas. In order to be effective, such dikes require a large number of sandbags and must be assembled quickly.
There are several problems, however, with creating these sandbag dikes. First, filling sandbags by hand, the usual method, is very time consuming and requires large numbers of people to create a typical sandbag dike. Second, the site of the sand and the site of the potential flood are often distanced from each other, thus a sandbag filling crew and a sandbag dike building crew are both needed. Typically, the sandbags will have to be transported from the filling site to the flood site.